This is part of a blog series on the Helsinki Python meetup AI RAG Hackathon announced in March 2025. The winners were announced in May 2025: The Integration track winner was MCP, the Innovation track winner was YouTube Semantic Search, and runner-up Wikipedia Enhancer. We collected conclusions for future hackathons.
One week left to join the AI RAG Hackathon with MariaDB Vector and Python!
Winners get to demo at the Helsinki Python meetup in May, receive merit and publicity from MariaDB Foundation and Open Ocean Capital, and prizes from Finnish verkkokauppa.com.
To participate, gather a team (1-5 people) and submit an idea by the end of March for one of the two tracks. You then have until May 5th to develop the idea before the meetup 27th May.
- Integration track: Enable MariaDB Vector in an existing open source project or AI-framework. See possible frameworks e.g. here, or add RAG magics to the MariaDB Jupyter kernel.
- Innovation track: Build a reference implementation for a use case, such as a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system in text, image, voice, or video form. What would be an interesting dataset or use case to implement RAG on?
We are looking forward to your idea submission to hackathon@mariadb.org!
For further details on participation see Join our AI Hackathon with MariaDB Vector.
